News in Pictures 1

The blue Crystal Cave ice cave is illuminated by the evening sun in Svinafellsjokull in Skaftafell, Iceland. Created by the forces of the Vatnajokull ice cap in the south of the volcanic island, the deep blue cave was formed by the glacier meeting the coastline. The centuries-old ice that has come from the slopes of 6,921 feet tall Oaefajokull, Iceland's tallest active volcano, has compressed all air out of the ice adding to the texture and colour of the cave....

The Milky Way stretches across the night sky behind a rock arch in Arches National Park, Utah. Bret Webster uses the night skies of the national parks of his home state of Utah as his canvas to create images that highlight the relative insignificance of the Earth in the cosmos.

Lightning from a severe thunderstorm flashes in the distance beyond a crucifix in a cemetery near Easton, Kansas

Damage is shown after a tornado hit northern Minneapolis. At least one tornado hit Minneapolis, damaging scores of homes and toppling hundreds of trees.

A tornado passes near the Ryan Ranch subdivision in southern Denton County, Texas

Lightning strikes in the erupting Grmsvotn volcano, as seen from Sprengisandur, in the central highlands of Iceland, 60km away from the eruption...

A small plane flies past the ash and smoke plume from the eruption of the Grimsvotn volcano, under the Vatnajokull glacier in southeast Iceland. Airlines began cancelling flights to Britain because of the ash cloud reaching its airspace, although experts expected no repeat of the travel chaos from an eruption a year ago.

Space shuttle Endeavour Commander Mark Kelly (L) and station flight engineer Ron Garan can be seen in a window of the International Space Station's cupola in this photo taken by spacewalking astronaut Mike Fincke

NASA astronaut Andrew Feustel, STS-134 mission specialist, is pictured during the mission's extravehicular activity (EVA) as construction and maintenance continue on the International Space Station

This NASA image shows a three-millimetre diameter droplet of heptane fuel as it burns in microgravity, producing soot. When a bright, uniform backlight is placed behind the droplet and flame and recorded by a video camera, the soot appears as a dark cloud. Image processing techniques can then quantify the soot concentration at each point in the image. On the International Space Station, the Flame Extinguishing Experiment examines the combustion of such liquid fuel droplets.This colourised grey-scale image is a composite of the individual video frames of the backlit fuel droplet. The bright yellow structure in the middle is the path of the droplet, which becomes smaller as it burns. Initial soot structures (in green) tend to form near the liquid fuel. These come together into larger and larger particles which ultimately spiral out of the flame zone in long, twisting streamers.

This is the most detailed image ever taken of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy. An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, used radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere to produced this image. "These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. Mueller and her team targeted Centaurus A (Cen A), a nearby galaxy with a supermassive black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's mass. Seen in radio waves, Cen A is one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. This is because the visible galaxy lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting lobes, each nearly a million light-years long.

Lt Col John Klatt of the United States Air National Guard aerobatic flies inverted over Jones Beach, New York. Flanking Col Klatt are aerobatic pilots Mike Goulian (red plane) and Bill Kerns (blue) ahead of this weekend's Bethpage Federal Credit Union Air Show at Jones Beach State Park

Newly commissioned 2nd lieutenants throw their caps in the air as a team of US Air Force Thunderbirds fly over the 2011 graduating class of the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs

An eight-year-old boy playing hide-and-seek with his friends had to be rescued by firefighters after getting stuck in the narrow gap between two walls in Bijie, southwest China's Guizhou Province. Firefighters arrived on the scene when the boy had been trapped for an hour. It then took them a further two hours to free him by breaking a hole in the wall of one of the buildings. Afterwards the boy was checked over by medical staff but was unhurt from his ordeal.

US President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama react as the car carrying Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh arrives at Winfield House in London

The US Presidential Cadillac, nicknamed "The Beast", is seen stuck on a ramp at the American Embassy in Dublin in this still image taken from video. Specially built to withstand bombs, bullets and chemical attack, the car beached itself on the top of the ramp as it tried to exit the embassy during Obama's one-day visit to Ireland. The White House later said Obama and his wife, Michelle, were not in the vehicle at the time.

A police spotter turns to see his cap blow away from the top of Buckingham Palace before the arrival of US President Barack Obama

A couple stands in front of the skyline after a rain storm in Toronto

A boy clings onto a passenger jeep on a flooded street in Manila, Philippines

Toronto FC's Alen Stevanovic, right, tackles Vancouver Whitecaps' Davide Chiumiento during the second half of the Canadian Championship football final in Toronto, before rain stopped play

The Sydney Opera House sails are illuminated on opening night of the 2011 Vivid Sydney Festival

Men line up with their inflatable "partners" before the Barracudas 2011 race on the river Neris, in Vilnius. About 20 men raced down the half-kilometre river course, floating on their blow-up dolls, in the Lithuanian captial.

Lady Gaga hangs from a wire zip line as she rides to the stage during a live concert performance in New York's Central Park televised on ABC's Good Morning America

In a scene remniscent of Iwo Jima, workers remove a British flag after noticing it had been hanging upside down outside the palace where the G8 member states leaders were having lunch at the G8 Summit in Deauville, France